Samuel David Luzzatto

Samuel David Luzzatto (b. Trieste 1800–d. Padua 1865), also known as Shadal, was an exegete, linguist, philologist, and passionate editor of medieval Jewish texts as much as a theologian, historian, and philosopher. His intellectual life was closely related to the Rabbinic College of Padua, the first rabbinic college in the world, founded in 1829. Despite not being a rabbi himself, Shadal trained dozens of rabbis, who left an indelible mark on Judaism in Italy for more than a century and a half. Although he lived his entire life as a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Luzzatto strongly felt himself to be Italian and wrote part of his works in Italian. He had also a great interest in revitalizing the Hebrew language, which he used for his correspondence and for many books. Luzzatto was strictly Orthodox and never cast doubts on Moses’ paternity of the Torah. Nonetheless, he did not have any disdain for academic education nor for the stimuli that came from the Wissenschaft des Judentums (the Science of Judaism), since he studied the languages necessary to understand the text of the Jewish tradition (Hebrew and Aramaic) and prepared critical editions of medieval texts. Together with Zacharias Frankel, Shadal represented a more conservative wing of Wissenschaft, for he firmly believed that Reformism was to be avoided and the interpretation of Jewish books should be based on the faith in revelation (yet he also thought that one could and should adopt a scientific method to approach them). His Italian translation and commentary of Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) is a fundamental work to understand Judaism in Italy. One can add the version into Italian of the Jewish books of prayers (Siddur and Machzor), which was primarily produced in response to a request made by the Habsburgs. Although his main field of study was the Bible, Luzzatto was also an interested reader of philosophical and theological works. These readings gave origin to some courses that Shadal held at the rabbinic college as much as to some conferences and speeches addressed to the Jewish students at Padua. Luzzatto maintained an epistolary correspondence with most of the Jewish and many non-Jewish intellectuals of his age, becoming an essential reference point for the scholars who referred to the Wissenschaft (e.g., Leopold Zunz, Abraham Geiger, Solomon Rapaport, Moritz Steinschneider). Shadal was the counterpart of the mystical approach to tradition represented by Elia Benamozegh and the yeshiva of Livorno, which represented the other pole of Italian Judaism in the nineteenth century. Shadal was a rationalist and harshly critical towards the Qabbalah. Nonetheless, he was also contrary to Maimonides’s and Ibn Ezra’s positions (Maimonides, in particular, was considered excessively Aristotelian), and he instead followed the approach of Rashi and Yehuda ha-Levi, contrasting revealed faith and philosophical thought as equally valid but fundamentally irreconcilable forms of knowledge.